Chile Forum

Chile Forum in English for Gringos, Expatriates, and Travelers to Exchange Ideas and Information about Chile, South America. For more than a decade, the Chile Forum has been the center for expats to share their collective knowledge and experience about living in Chile. The Chile Forum is a free community service brought to you by the law office of Spencer Global.

I actually think this is a smart move by Trump. There is a lot in the press about his inability to focus on summit prep (like most everything else), and it has been clear for some time that the admin did not have a clear idea of what it was looking for except a vague notion of denuclearization (which clearly meant something else to the N Koreans). He has put so much political capital into a successful outcome (the calls for a Nobel prize, distraction from the weakness of the Republicans going into the November elections), and the bargaining positions of the two were so far apart, that the best he could have gotten out of a summit was a vague agreement to keep negotiating. As flawed as the past agreements with the N Koreans have been, they were much more specific than anything that Trump could have gotten in Singapore. In this sense he has cut his political losses before they continued to grow. That letter, though, was classic Trump.

You Hit the nail on the head there, he knew the score, and knew he couldn't carry on with the summit, and was perhaps a little naive (like so many things he does) in the first place calling a summit, when all other senior diplomats and advisors from both sides (well those that were not blowing smoke up his arse ) said that NK were not be trusted.

In the Lakes Region Chile for 6 years. It looks like New Zealand in some ways, and is nearly at the bottom of the world too, but there the similarities end.

So all these shown reversal of attitude from NK, as Trmpster says, Xi Jinping is steering the shit behind the chubby kid..

Don't forget Bolton's and Pence's comments about the "Libya model." I'm not sure what Bolton was intending, but it looks like he was trying to influence the boss. At the time, Trump was saying all kinds of ridiculous things about getting along with N Korea, and Bolton said it on Fox--where Trump gets most of his information.

This kind of behavior is standard for Trump. It comes straight out of "The art of the deal".
Be unpredictable. Change your mind. Walk away. Say contradictory things. Keep the other side guessing.
So far he is still doing as good as all the previous presidents who dealt with North Korea. They either did nothing, or made things worse.

My concern, if China is behind NK's change of demeanor, is the imbalance in the ratio between males and females in the Chinese (and Indian) populations. This can certainly tilt the tables towards war. Even though China has never been warlike, this demographic imbalance is a force to be reckoned with. All that anger and frustrated testosterone needs to be directed somewhere.

... the second North Korean official came out and she, I think, really offered the statement that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

What she said was that it was the U.S. who had asked for the meeting. And I think that a lot of this has been driven by the president's ego — that is the thing that he identifies at the top of the letter.

He says it's irrelevant but, it's the first thing he talks about — the idea of who invited whom. I think for Trump it was very important to depict this as the North Koreans coming to him because they had been pressured.

And I think for the North Koreans, it was the opposite narrative, that Trump was coming to them. So, it turns out Singapore is not big enough for both their egos.

In response to Trmpster's change of heart for the summit, NK's First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan said. Kim still open to U.S. summit despite Trump’s abrupt cancellation:

North Korea said Friday it was still willing to talk to the United States after President Donald Trump abruptly canceled a summit between the two countries, a decision that has thrown the Korean Peninsula once more into uncertainty.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday called off his planned June summit with Kim Jong Un, blaming “open hostility” from the North Korean regime and warning Pyongyang against committing any “foolish or reckless acts.”

In a letter to Kim, Trump announced he would not go ahead with the high-stakes meeting set for June 12 in Singapore, following what the White House called a “trail of broken promises” by the North.

Pyongyang’s immediate reaction to the sudden U-turn was surprisingly conciliatory. First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan called Trump’s decision “unexpected” and “regrettable” but he left the door open for further diplomacy.

“We again state to the U.S. our willingness to sit face-to-face at any time in any form to resolve the problem,” he said in a statement carried by the state-run KCNA news agency.

Just before Trump announced the cancellation of the talks, North Korea declared it had “completely” dismantled its nuclear test site, in a carefully choreographed move portrayed as a goodwill gesture ahead of the summit.

But the chances of success for the unprecedented face-to-face had recently been thrown into doubt.

Trump’s announcement came a day after Pyongyang hardened its rhetoric, calling comments by Vice President Mike Pence “ignorant and stupid.”

“Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting,” read Trump’s letter to Kim, which was dictated word for word by the U.S. leader, according to a senior White House official.

The decision appeared to blindside treaty ally South Korea, which until now had brokered a remarkable detente between Washington and Pyongyang.

“It is shocking and very regrettable that the U.S.-North Korea summit will not take place as scheduled,” South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who met Trump in Washington earlier this week, said in a statement as he scrambled his national security team late Thursday.

The Pentagon indicated it was braced to respond to possible “provocative actions” on Pyongyang’s part.

But Trump also held out hope that a meeting with Kim could still take place, saying: “It’s possible that the existing summit could take place, or a summit at some later date. Nobody should be anxious. We have to get it right.

“If and when Kim Jong Un chooses to engage in constructive dialogue and actions, I am waiting,” he added.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the parties to keep talking, as did host Singapore, while Russian President Vladimir Putin held out hope that dialogue would resume and the talks would eventually take place.

Politically, Trump had invested heavily in the success of the planned summit. But as the date drew nearer, the gulf in expectations between the two sides became apparent.

Washington has made it clear it wants to see the “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” of the North.

But Pyongyang has vowed it will never give up its nuclear deterrent until it feels safe from what it terms U.S. aggression.

A senior White House official said Pyongyang had demonstrated a “profound lack of good faith” in the run-up to the summit — including standing up the White House’s deputy chief of staff, who had traveled to Singapore for preparatory talks.

“They waited and they waited. The North Koreans never showed up. The North Koreans did not tell us anything — they simply stood us up,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The White House viewed North Korea’s objection to a routine U.S.-South Korean joint military exercise — and its recent cancellation of a meeting with the South Koreans — as a breach of its commitments leading up to the summit.

It also was unhappy about the North’s failure to allow international observers to verify the dismantling of its Punggye-ri test site, the staging ground for all six of its nuclear tests which was buried inside a mountain near the border with China.

Experts warned that canceling the meeting could have knock-on effects.

“South Korea is also likely to be angered… Expect Seoul to try to continue engagements with Pyongyang, even if it widens a rift with Washington,” Abraham Denmark, director of the Asia program at the Wilson Center think tank, wrote on Twitter.

Democratic congressional leader Nancy Pelosi was scathing toward Trump’s administration — blaming a lack of preparation for the summit collapse and judging Kim to be the “big winner.

“It’s clear he didn’t know what he was getting into,” she said of Trump. “And now he’s walking away from it in this very chummy, palsy-walsy letter to Kim Jong Un.”

Many questions remain unanswered about North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s
visit to China from March 25 to 28. For example, did Xi Jinping and Kim reach any private understandings on loosening pressure and supporting North Korea’s economic development? Did Xi counsel Kim on how to deal with President Trump and, if so, what advice did he provide? Did the two sides reach any shared view on a sequence of steps for lowering tensions on the Korean Peninsula?

Without yet knowing the answers to these questions, and recognizing that any understanding of the substance of the visit presently is based solely on characterizations from both governments and their official news outlets, which do not hold a reputation for impartiality or objectivity, a few initial observations nevertheless can be made. First, Beijing reasserted itself as a central actor in managing security issues in Northeast Asia. Second, Kim maintained initiative in dictating the direction and speed of developments on the Korean Peninsula. Third, the visit gave the impression of a White House that was caught off guard rather than leading international efforts to confront North Korea and push it toward denuclearization

Snowden, speaking from Moscow, said he also doesn’t believe Trump is the kind of crack double operator Putin would rely on.

“To be honest, everyone who has heard Trump speak for three minutes knows he’s a wrecking ball,” he said. “This does not sound like the kind of person that you would want to engage in some kind of complicated ‘Manchurian Candidate’” spy operation, when “the guy can’t even remember what he’s going to say at the end of a sentence.”